It Keeps Moving Along and I Keep Coming Along

Today I will feature pictures from my trip to Western Village in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan. Western Village is a well-known spot in for explorers living in Japan. It has been written in expat urbexer blogs like this and this. They provide a good background of why Western Village closed. Looking at each blogs photos, you still see a some color to the park. By the time I went there ( early Fall 2017), the place has faded quite a bit. Kudzu is also taking over and vandalism has taken its toll.

It’s a place you can easily spend three or four hours exploring. I wasn’t able to see the entire area because it was getting too late. I had taken a few local trains plus a bullet train to arrive here. The money spent and the time invested in commute added up. What I did see was worth the expense in my opinion. The UFO catchers had been looted of their treasures long ago. Some vandal made the interesting artistic choice of leaving severed doll heads in a crane game.

My personal highlight was the staggering amount of animatronics left in various states of neglect and abuse. This place is an unintentional haunted house. Image bringing kids here to trick-or-treat and they get to see this: